UNFOLDING OLANA

In 2023, Site-Specific Dances received support from the Charles E. Culpeper Arts & Culture program of the Rockefeller Brothers’ Fund to create an ambitious new work responding to OLANA- the artist-designed environment created by the Hudson River School painter, Frederic Church. Church worked across mediums (painting, landscape design, architecture, environmentalism, exhibition design) - an early ‘interdisciplinarian’. At Olana, the physical landscapes are framed by the house design (spatial organization and the articulation of framed apertures) as animated paintings, while Church's paintings of landscapes were famously immersive and photorealistic. Unfolding Olana explores this relationship - between representation and physical space.

The project is being developed in three phases:

a creative residency at the Olana State Historic Site in 2023
a performance residency at the Rockefeller estate in 2024
the anticipated public programming of the piece in 2025/2026

In the summer of 2023, Site-Specific Dances completed a creative residency at the Olana State Historic Site, hosted by The Olana Partnership. The residency provided the opportunity to engage with the legacy and ideas of Frederic Church, engage with the site and its community through performance, and to film a series of site-specific dance/film vignettes.

In the summer of 2024, Unfolding Olana was adapted for the stage, during a performance residency at the David Rockefeller Arts Center in Tarrytown, NY.

Responding to the multiple scales at play, Unfolding Olana is presented in three sections: HOUSE, LANDSCAPE, and VIEWSHED. The performance explores the physical spaces of Olana through video documentation of site-specific choreography and the “conceptual space” of the site through diagrammatic animations.

Original Commissioned Music: Phong Tran and Darian Donovan Thomas.

Presented in partnership with the RBF’s Culpeper Arts & Culture program. Special Thanks: The Olana Partnership and New York State Parks.

SCALE I. HOUSE

“ Of all the devices integral to Church’s new house the most important for cultivating thoughts about nature was a varied series of spaces that erode the separation of interior and exterior … the Piazza, Round Veranda, and Bell Tower “ - Barry Bergdoll, “In Frederic Church’s Umbra”

A series of analytical animations explore how the Hudson River School’s Frederic Church took the original spatial concept of a courtyard typology and adapted it, creating not simply a house, but a machine for viewing the landscape. Using view corridors that terminate in apertures that frame views like paintings and liminal indoor/outdoor rooms that allow for immersion in the landscape, the house breaks down the experiential barrier between inside and outside, but also blurs the experiential distinction between representation (painting) and environment. A live dance solo occupies this threshold, interwoven with slowly rotating and morphing tiles of animations - a ‘drama of ideas’ that fuses architectural analysis with performance.

SCALE II: LANDSCAPE

Section II draws inspiration from painting galleries, and gallery wall composition, placing the viewer in a room of animated landscape paintings drawn from many parts of the Olana State Historic Site. The immersive media is arranged in a sequence from morning to dusk.

Original Music: Darian Donovan Thomas
Dancers: Jaqlin Medlock, Justin Rainey, Katherine Kiessling, Tracy Dunbar, Ashley LaRosa, Charles Scheland, Cori Lewis
Live music: Darian Donovan Thomas and Phong Tran

SCALE III: VIEWSHED

Church designed Olana as a three-dimensional work of art that includes borrowed views beyond the immediate site. A series of performance animations present a provocation - what if you could stage a performance that filled the entire viewshed? A virtual performance / simulation, imagines large formations of dancers in the distant view, dancers as topography covering vast terrains - in conversation with energetic live ensemble dance, choreographed by Michael Spencer Phillips. The St. Lawrence Concrete Factory makes an appearance as a fleeting antagonist, representing the specter of industrial development, a threat not only to the views essential to Olana, but also to the preservation of the natural environment. The Olana Partnership and other community stakeholders were able to stop its construction, representing an inspiring alliance between art history and environmentalism - as Church himself would likely have championed.

Original Music: Phong Tran
Dancers: Jaqlin Medlock, Justin Rainey, Katherine Kiessling, Tracy Dunbar, Ashley LaRosa, Charles Scheland, Cori Lewis
Live music: Darian Donovan Thomas and Phong Tran